Dear Editor,
An inventory of the eclectic tastes of the lives of those whose minds were cultivated to delight in the pleasures of higher mental operations such as the sciences, art and ideological activities will certainly reveal a stark contrast when compared with the tastes of a life and mind left largely undeveloped, unschooled and suited for mere manual labour. The cultured class with their refined sensibilities and air of urbaneness derives pleasures from their mode of being that are qualitatively superior and healthier to those of a lower class, whose agreeable pursuits, it seems, revolve around a perpetual state of instinctual satisfaction.
The sublime or the elevated human, a polished end product of culture and breeding, acquires his nourishment for body and mind from sources far removed from the reaches of man the animal. Give man the animal or the organism his daily recommended dosages of calories or more, strenuous physical work, and an abundance of opportunities for disposing of libido concentrated in his genitals and he would be forever grateful to you for prolonging his much loved mechanical state of existence. In biblical parlance man the animal wants bread alone.
But his counterpart, the exalted superorganic creature whose needs and recurring discontents sustains his quest for higher and nobler things, wants culture; his renunciation of a life governed purely by the instincts now puts at his disposal reserves of instinctual energies dedicated and in service for creating new worlds and elaborate modes of gratification. The high-brow man has resolved to labour mentally to discover his nature and the life proper to his kind. Man the human doesn’t want to go back to the woods once he has tasted culture, he resents that primal appeal we all share and which threatens to relegate him back to the animal kingdom just as an indifferent member.
Sublimated man needs to derive pleasures not just from the erogenous zones of his body filled with erotic potentialities, he also requires constant cognitive stimulation. He wants to excite his imagination and rarefied senses, he desires a life of the mind, to apprehend its role in existence and longs for the pleasures of cognized events, he wants to discover truths that once resided in the hearts and minds of poets, philosophers, musicians and painters. And for this he must engage the likes of Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach and their peers, and whenever so desirous of reaching even higher emotional states he must inevitably reach for the champion Wagner.
Discovering the subliminal messages and truths embedded in the androgynous nature of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa riddled with symbols of the sexual completeness and nature of man as both masculine and feminine must tickle his fancy. Urbane man must be so constituted that he finds sensual the cubist form of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques, with its characteristic multi-perspectival style. Piet Mondrian stand-alone forms and the artistic goals of the other abstract expressionist painters he ought to find interesting too.
The poets who are the heirs to the mystical tradition must rile and soothe his emotions, the poets who anticipated Freud in discovering the unconscious were revealing truths and ideas to man long before Freud discovered a scientific method (psychoanalysis) for making our unconscious purposes and ideas conscious. Debonair man should be equipped to savour the poetic sweetness of a Rilke's, “unlived lines of the body”. Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum) must salivate his existential angst. And whenever Karl Marx’s Marxism is unceremoniously introduced as a potential conversational piece, the cultured man by now intoxicated from his repository of luxurious pleasures would have been impatient to explain why Marx said philosophers up until Hegel have merely interpreted the world, what is needed now is action. The preceding an obvious precursor to Marx’s revolutionary fervour.
Pondering the revolutionary ideas and scientific principles of Albert Einstein must continue to replenish his economy of joy. The residues of Victorian mannerisms, politeness, morals and sexual attitudes manifested in the ruling class of former colonies of the empire the enlightened man must hasten to adhere to and observe; knowing that it happily distinguishes him from the baser and coarser ways of his inferior. The gastronomical and culinary delights of civilized man must extend beyond the sole function of satisfying his pangs of hunger and intake of calories; the selection and consumption of food must be a qualitative experience rather than a laborious and unhealthy gut-stuffing exercise for him.
Seeking out avenues of pleasures that genuinely fulfil the higher needs of a high-minded man is in itself an enjoyable undertaking. Consistently submerging himself in the sea of the aesthetically pleasing enriches the life of exalted man, so much so, that he is forever the object of envy and ridicule from his beastly opposite. Unsuited and unable to exploit the superior tastes and subtleties of cultured man, the beast becomes enraged and angry, constantly repeating it must be the devil in him.
Orlando Patterson.
